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The Current Transcript for December 17, 2024

Host: Matt Galloway

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I have a question for the Finance Minister. Who are you?

[Laughs from the audience]

YVES-FRANCOIS BLANCHET: Mr. Trudeau's government is over. He must acknowledge that, and act accordingly.

MATT GALLOWAY: Astonishing. Unprecedented. Surreal. There are any number of ways to describe the last 24 hours in Canadian politics, as the Finance Minister quits with a blistering resignation letter just hours before she was set to deliver the fall economic statement of a deeply unpopular federal government. Our national affairs panel awaits to explain what happened, why and how long the Prime Minister can hang on. That's in just a moment. Also this morning...

SOUNDCLIP

JONATHAN HAIDT: My daughter called out from the next room. She said, Daddy, can you take the iPad away from me? I'm trying to take my eyes off it, but I can't.

MATT GALLOWAY: Almost any parent or teacher is familiar with the struggle of keeping kids' attention focussed on the things in front of them rather than the phone in their hands. And their concerns are shared by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. "The Anxious Generation." His blockbuster book looks at what he calls the rewiring of the teenage brain. In 30 minutes, Jonathan Haidt on the dangers of a phone-based childhood. Whether the evidence is there to actually connect to mental health crisis, to screen time and what he would tell the boss of Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg. But we begin with a remarkable day in Ottawa and a Prime Minister's future hanging in the balance. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Chrystia Freeland’s shock resignation

Guests: Rosemary Barton, Stephanie Levitz

SOUNDCLIP

JUSTIN TRUDEAU: It's obviously been an eventful day.

MG: Well, that's one way to put it. The fall economic statement is usually the biggest political news on the day that it is released. Yesterday, not so much. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ended the day with applause at a party fundraiser. But in the hours leading up to that, the criticism had been piling up, starting with the resignation of his Finance Minister, Chrystia Freeland. With me to talk about way more than the fall economic statement are Rosemary Barton, the CBC's chief political correspondent, fresh off of, what? 12 hours on live television? And Stephanie Levitz, senior reporter at the Globe and Mail's Parliamentary bureau. Good morning to you both.

ROSEMARY BARTON: Morning, Matt.

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: Good morning.

MG: Rosy, what is the word that you would use to describe yesterday?

ROSEMARY BARTON: Stunning. Devastating, Shocking. I mean, all those words, I don't use those words actually very often as a journalist. I try not to exaggerate. But in this case, I think that they all apply, and they all apply because of the timing of what happened. Obviously, the resignation being timed to, to happen just hours before the Finance Minister was set to deliver the update. Stunning because the Prime Minister's Office and the Prime Minister had no idea this was coming. And also shocking because Chrystia Freeland had been such a loyal foot soldier for Justin Trudeau from the very beginning, one of the first star can--, the first star candidate he recruited back in 2013, winning in a by-election then. All of those factors make this so such an incredible, incredible political moment and also a really difficult, really difficult moment for Justin Trudeau. I would say the most difficult moment he's had so far.

MG: Stephanie, what about for you?

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: I mean, maximum chaos, Matt. It has been a long time in the political world. I would say that you have seen the rug so thoroughly pulled out from underneath people on Parliament Hill and broader than it was yesterday. You know, again, as you alluded to off the top there, the fall economic statement, I mean, it was never going to be a good news day yesterday for the Justin Trudeau Liberal government. This fall economic statement was going to come in with a higher than projected deficit. There was going to be questions about that, there was no doubt. But it went from, like, bad to worse in the space of a nanosecond. And the also, the shift in opinion on Chrystia Freeland yesterday also was really striking. You know, like, up until probably about 9:01 a.m. yesterday, there were a ton of people who thought she was very weak and that, you know, she was letting Trudeau boss her around, and how could she possibly take this? And, you know, by like 9:07 when her letter was circulating around, she was suddenly everybody's hero without a cape.

MG: What do we know, Steph, about what led to her decision? There's talk that on Friday, she had a call with the Prime Minister. And then, what do we know about that?

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: So, what we know is that the two offices, as is normal, had some tension between them. They offices being the Prime Minister's Office and the Finance Office, right? And the tension was, of course, that, you know, Ms. Freeland was trying to sort of prudently steward through the nation's finances, making choices that she felt would align with the "fiscal guardrails" she called them, that she would put around to keep things on track. Mr. Trudeau had a more political view of things, and wanting to spend in such a way that aligned with the Liberals' ideologies, but also that he felt was politically beneficial. These two things really came to a head after Donald Trump and his 25 per cent tariff threat. The government was promising billions in GST holiday, new cheques for Canadians. Chrystia Freeland is saying, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Like if he goes in with this threat, our economy is going to be devastated. We need to hold on to our cash." This all came to a head with a call between them over Zoom, Zoom on Friday, where Mr. Trudeau, you know, as we've reported and elsewhere, said to Ms. Freeland, "Listen, I'd still like you to do the finance statement on Monday, but after that, I'm moving you along from the job."

MG: In The Globe, you suggested that she had been offered this position that would allow her to deal with the crisis coming from south of the border and deal with the United States. But this was a position, as you say, with no money, no authority, no staff. And she said "No thanks."

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: Pretty much. I mean, you know, think about that. Think she's gone. She was the Prime Minister's number two, Finance Minister, the most powerful cabinet position in the country, absent the Prime Minister's. And suddenly, she's been told effectively she's becoming minister without portfolio. And I should add this also, when she wasn't even invited to Mar-a-Lago for dinner with Donald Trump, you know, two and a half weeks ago with the Prime Minister.

MG: Rosie, it's not just that she left. It's not just that she left hours before she was set to deliver the fall economic statement. It's that she left with this letter that was, you know, people poured over line by line, a letter that says, "Canadians know when we're working for them, and they equally know when we are focussed on ourselves." How much damage does something like that wrapped altogether do to the Prime Minister, but also to the party?

ROSEMARY BARTON: Yeah, I mean, I think it was written and delivered in a way as Steph points out at 9:07 to, to exact maximum damage on the Prime Minister. It wasn't just, you were going to, "I perceive what you offered me as a demotion and I don't want to do it." It was, "We've had policy problems. And by the way, I'm not interested in your costly political gimmicks," is what she called those affordability measures. And if someone was serious about taking on Donald Trump, they would keep their powder dry. That is a full-throttled attack on Justin Trudeau's credibility.

MG: It's a vote. It's a vote of non-confidence.

ROSEMARY BARTON: It absolutely is, in him and the direction that he's taking the country. It is also, and I'm sure we'll get there. It is also an attempt by Chrystia Freeland to very decisively separate herself from the Prime Minister to show what she would do differently in case we do find ourselves in the midst of a leadership race, because that is sort of job number one for someone, right? Who was in his, who in his government, was in his cabinet, is to try to find a way to differentiate herself. And that was done in a very purposeful way. I should say, just back to the call on Friday, that Steph described there so well. I will say that from what I understand, the offer that was made to Chrystia Freeland was not seen as a demotion by the Prime Minister's Office. It was seen as something that she could dis--, you know, figure out herself, take on as much or as little as she wanted. And there was no sense in that phone call that they had upset her or that she was going to leave. That, to me, is a striking bit of information because it shows that the breakdown that Steph described there, the breakdown in their relationship was so intense that he couldn't even read the possibility that this would be unacceptable to her.

MG: So, what happens now to get to a leadership race that may or may not happen? You, the leader, has to leave. We're going to speak with a couple of the MPs who have been calling for him to leave. They'll join us later on in the program. The editorial in The Toronto Star this morning says the same thing, that he has to leave for, for the benefit of the country, but also to salvage his reputation and perhaps the, you know, the legacy of some of the things that he put into place. You said yesterday, hours into the broadcast, Rosie, that your views on what might happen had changed over the course of the day.

ROSEMARY BARTON: Yeah, well, because I think things changed for, for the Prime Minister and in the office, I was told that he was shaken, like really shaken by, by this when he headed into that cabinet meeting that was already planned and then, sort of went into lockdown mode with his senior staff and his trusted advisers. What Justin Trudeau has done, though, time and again, particularly over the past six months, is acknowledged the problem, not acknowledged that the problem is in any way him. And then, just sort of coast along until he's past the moment. And I felt that that happened a little bit yesterday when he went into that caucus meeting where we got this incredible TV shot...

MG: Through the blinds that were open?

ROSEMARY BARTON: Through the blinds that no one realised were open until, you know, 10 minutes into the meeting. And there was some support in caucus for him. It wasn't just a whole room of people saying, "You've got to go." And I think he left that meeting feeling a little bit differently about things. And then, he went on to that fundraiser where Matt, he not only gave a speech, he stood there for a long time taking photos with some of the biggest fundraisers. So, I think he's going to take, I think he's going to take a minute. I think he's going to go away over the holidays and think about it. I mean, the House is rising today, and that is hugely helpful for, for him and for the government's timing. So, I'm not sure what he's going to do because this is not a guy who likes to give up. But I don't honestly know how he continues. It is, to me, baffling. It would be incredibly challenging for him to continue now.

MG: Steph, do you think he can survive as leader of the party and why would he think that he could survive as leader?

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: You would think he could survive as leader for the same reason he could call Chrystia Freeland on Zoom and fire her, but then tell her that she still needs to deliver the fall economic statement on Monday. His conception of things does not necessarily align with how people perceive his own actions. What's interesting, I suppose, about that caucus meeting that happened yesterday and we'll see where things go, this is a very fast-moving story in its own way, right, is even with the tension with Chrystia Freeland, there did not appear to be a critical mass of Members of Parliament standing up and saying, "Boss, you have to go." And you have to wonder why that is, Matt. I mean, I, we could go out in the weeds. They don't have a procedural mechanism to vote him out, yada, yada. But if the pressure internally was that intense, he would go. Back in October when this happened, you know, the MPs were believing themselves to, if they could get Trudeau to go, if they could get a new leader, maybe they could hold on to their seats, right? There is some degree of political self-interest involved here. They would like to win again. And one has to wonder, are folks giving up? Are MPs, yes, there are some that are speaking out publicly, but it's not a critical mass. I had thought, frankly, that Sean Fraser, the Housing Minister, his decision not to run again, which was supposed to be another big political story yesterday, you know, sort of signalled a bit of a canary in the coal mine, like someone reading the tea leaves who is a popular Minister in the Trudeau cabinet, who is a good communicator, well-liked by a lot of people, and saying that he wasn't going to run again. You know, that's an acknowledgement he's going to lose his seat. And so, I thought we were seeing a turning point yesterday where maybe Liberals were seeing the writing on the wall, realising maybe they're just not going to win no matter what. And the caucus meeting yesterday had a [inaudible] of that as well. Are they just giving up in there, and are going to all go down with the ship?

MG: The Conservatives, as you could imagine, have seized on this chaos and are calling, they've been calling for an election for some time, but saying that now, now is the time. Have a listen to Pierre Poilievre.

SOUNDCLIP

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Now is the time for a carbon tax election to turn the decision away from me or Mr. Trudeau or Mr. Singh or Mr. Carney and put it in the hands of the people. I know that they will make the right decision.

MG: Rosie, you mentioned Mark Carney there. I wonder what Mark Carney thinks of all of this. What did you make of the tone of Pierre Poilievre yesterday?

ROSEMARY BARTON: You know, he smartly took a moment to react because he was supposed to come out earlier in the day. He smartly took a moment to sort of see where things landed. This, to him is exactly sort of the case that he's been building against the Prime Minister. And in fact, he used Chrystia Freeland's words against the Prime Minister to make that case yesterday directly to Canadians. The worst thing that could happen, I think, for Pierre Poilievre is that there is a leadership race. That is part of what he did yesterday. He wants the election to happen.

MG: The worst thing because of it, it would change, change the target in some ways?

ROSEMARY BARTON: It would change. Yeah, it would change the leader. It would delay the outcome. He would miss this moment of chaos as an opportunity. This could be, take months and months and months. You know, if he ends up with a different opponent, who knows what will happen? So, yeah, that's why they're calling and calling and calling for an election. You know, yesterday was also remarkable because Jagmeet Singh, for the first time, said the Prime Minister had to resign, but did not go on to say exactly what that would mean, although his House leader later told David Cochrane that that they would vote non-confidence later in the spring. So, things are lining up in that way. And we'll see whether Justin Trudeau wants to fight that election and whether he can hang on or whether it's someone else.

MG: All eyes on Jagmeet Singh as the party, the NDP is the party that's been propping up the Liberals. Have a listen to what Mr. Singh had to say.

SOUNDCLIP

JAGMEET SINGH: All options are on the table. People are hurting. People are struggling. And so, all options are on the table.

REPORTER: Just to clarify, you're calling for him to resign, but you are not willing to vote no confidence in his government. How does those, how do those two things connect?

MG: All options are on the table.

REPORTER: That's not an answer.

JAGMEET SINGH: All options.

MG: It's not an answer, says the reporter to Jagmeet Singh. Steph, what did you make of that response from the leader of the NDP?

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: Yeah, that response. I heard somebody describe it later in the day as an element of political malpractice, which is to say that it was a moment in time. You know, political leaders, Matt, when they go into these, these moments before microphones, before cameras, generally speaking, when it's organised like that, was they prep for things, right? They've got someone saying, "All right, the reporter is going to ask you this, what's your answer?" And that answer that he, he couldn't clearly articulate how he could have zero confidence in Justin Trudeau, but not be prepared to bring down a government made no sense. And it's something, you know, I understand the House leader trying to do a bit of damage control, saying, "No, no, you know, we might bring them down later." It just, you look at that and you think, "Okay, Mr. Singh and the New Democrats, What?"

MG: Is there the sense, Steph, that that if Justin Trudeau were to leave, that would, you know, blow some air into the embers of the Liberal Party, that it would revive the fortunes of the party?

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: There is a sense of that for sure, because there is a sense, I think, among even you know, I think some Conservatives will acknowledge this, that the desire for change is, exists throughout the country. People are very frustrated with the government. They're frustrated the status quo. But they also personally dislike Justin Trudeau at this point in the game, and putting a new leader in charge of the Liberal Party if it was someone that these people liked, it could be the thing that I don't think moves votes away from Pierre Poilievre, and towards the Liberals. What it will do is motivate Liberals to actually vote in the first place, and that's a problem I think the Liberals are going to have going into the election whereby, you know, a significant portion of their base doesn't love Mr. Poilievre and isn't interested in voting for him, but they don't want to vote for Justin Trudeau anymore. Therefore, they just sit on their hands and stay home.

MG: Rosie, the turmoil, chaos, whatever you want to call it, happens against the backdrop of these tariff threats from Donald Trump. Premiers are meeting just outside of Toronto. There's this photo of Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario, surrounded by microphones and the media. He's kind of the centre of attention, as he's saying that Canada needs to project strength and unity. What happens to Team Canada in the face of, of yesterday?

ROSEMARY BARTON: Yeah, I mean, I think that is the other biggest factor here for Justin Trudeau. I'm not sure if we weren't facing these tariffs that he couldn't just sort of skate along and everything would be fine. I think it is the moment in time that is also demanding something, something to happen. You know, Donald Trump saw what happened yesterday. He, he doesn't like Chrystia Freeland. He didn't like her all the way back in 2019 while they were negotiating NAFTA. And he called her behaviour "toxic" in a social media post last night. That is, that is not helpful to a country that is trying to kind of stay on his good side, frankly, and make sure these tariffs don't go into place. What you saw yesterday was a vacuum of leadership because of the chaos in Ottawa and the Premiers trying to fill it, which is, which is fine for a moment.

MG: And Danielle Smith, Danielle Smith told you that, right?

ROSEMARY BARTON: Yes, that's right. And that's fine for that day. But that's not going to work long-term. We need to have a federal government that has a clear mandate on how they're going to move forward with Donald Trump. And that is sort of what Chrystia Freeland's point was in her letter. We are staring down like, you know, economic disaster potentially. And if the Liberal government can't get its stuff together, that's going to be awfully hard to stave off. That is, that is an incredibly difficult moment. If we don't have a Prime Minister who has the authority needed in order to face these things.

MG: We have 90 seconds left. Steph, what's one thing you are watching that will give us a sense as to where this goes from here?

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: Does Mr. Trudeau intend to continue with the current Parliamentary session, or does he prorogue and try and come up with some kind of reset to do what Rosie said? Give the Liberals some time to try and get their stuff together to bolster the confidence of Canadians and take on Donald Trump?

MG: Rosie, one thing that you're looking for?

ROSEMARY BARTON: Yeah. Does he go away for a holiday and come back with a different point of view after some reflection? How does he, how does he think he can hang on?

MG: You have a year-end interview with the Prime Minister scheduled for tomorrow.

ROSEMARY BARTON: Well, we'll see.

MG: Events may unfold.

ROSEMARY BARTON: I'm changing the Q line, as you can imagine.

MG: We will be watching, and listening for that. In the meantime, it was quite a day yesterday. I appreciate you both walking us through what we know and where we may go from here. Thank you very much.

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: [Inaudible]

ROSEMARY BARTON: Thank you, Matt.

MG: Stephanie Levitz is a senior reporter with The Globe and Mail's Parliamentary Bureau. Rosemary Barton is the CBC's Chief Political Correspondent. Your CBC News is coming up next. And then...

SOUNDCLIP

JONATHAN HAIDT: A television that was entertaining, but a television couldn't train you. It didn't reward certain responses, whereas a touch screen [Music: Theme fading in] is very good at giving you a stimulus. You make a response, you touch, and then you get a reward. That's how you train a dog. That's how you train a circus elephant, and that's how you train a child.

MG: The social psychologist and bestselling author of "The Anxious Generation," Jonathan Haidt, has written about what he calls the great rewiring of childhood. What happens when you place phones in the hands of young people, and how their lives are changed? His book is a sensation, and he'll join us to talk about kids' phones, whether the evidence is actually there to show that those phones and what they're doing on those phones is impacting, in particular, their mental health, and how you go about freeing kids from a dependency on technology. That's coming up in six minutes. I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current. Stay with us.

[Music: Theme]

Jonathan Haidt on getting kids off phones – Part 1

Guest: Jonathan Haidt

MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current. When we look back on 2024, it may well be remembered as the year we got serious about how much time our kids spend on their cell phones and what that might be doing to their mental health.

SOUNDCLIP

UNKNOWN REPORTER: Right now, the movement to ban cell phones in public schools is gaining momentum across the country. In fact, at least 11 states have passed laws or enacted policies that ban or restrict students' use of cell phones in schools.

DWIGHT DRUMMOND: Five more Ontario school boards and two private schools in the province have joined a class action lawsuit against the world's top social media companies.

DEANA SUMANAC-JOHNSON: And Australia making a big move, becoming the first country to ban social media for kids under 16.

HEATHER HISCOX: Well, it's back to school time here in Europe, and France has been testing a mobile phone ban in hundreds of middle schools.

UNKNOWN REPORTER 2: The US Senate today passed the Kids Online Safety Act. If the bill passes the House, it'll mark the first time in 25 years that Congress has passed a bill aimed at better protecting children from dangers online.

MG: While concerns about kids and phones have been growing for almost as long as smartphones have existed, the push to move those kids off of screens and into the real world got a lot more traction this year, thanks to my next guest. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business. His latest book is called "The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness." This book has remained near the top of the New York Times bestseller list since it came out in March, sparking discussion and heated debate among its many readers while urging them to take action to free kids from what he calls "their phone-based lives." Jonathan Haidt is in New York City. Good morning.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Good morning, Matt. Pleasure to be with you.

MG: Glad to have you here. This is one of those books. I mean, it's a sensation and it's a book that parents talk about. It's a book that teachers talk about. It is a book that leaders of governments talk about. Why do you think this struck such a chord?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Because it crept up on us that somehow, family life around the developed world has turned into a fight over screen time. We're all struggling with this. When I was a kid, parents struggle with television. It's 100 times harder now. And because adults are so fed up with it and because we've all seen it, if not in our own kids, we've seen the anxiety, the pulling into a shell, the craziness. And teachers have been quitting in droves because it's no fun to teach when you can't get through to your students. So, it's kind of bizarre that we let it go this long. But my book came out earlier this year and everyone was ready to go. And people are moving around the world.

MG: I mean, you've seen it. I've seen it as a parent. This is something that people are really familiar with. In the book, you write about, you're on a trip to Vermont with your family and your daughter had the iPad. Tell me that story.

JONATHAN HAIDT: That's right. So, we're actually, we're sitting in the, in the breakfast area of a lovely country inn in Vermont. And my daughter called out from the next room. She said, "Daddy, can you take the iPad away from me? I'm trying to take my eyes off it, but I can't." Now, she was about six at the time and it was just so remarkable. I mean, these things, what people have to understand is that this is very different from television, a television set was entertaining, but a television couldn't train you. It didn't reward certain responses. Whereas a touchscreen is very good at giving you a stimulus. You make a response, you touch, and then you get a reward. That's how you train a dog. That's how you train a circus elephant, and that's how you train a child. And so, people have to understand, this is not like television. This is much more powerful.

MG: What did that tell you when your daughter said, "I'm trying to take my eyes off of it, but I can't?" What did that tell you in that moment?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, boy, you know, I've done a lot of writing about how the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. That's what my early research was on in moral psychology. And here, we have a case where we have a girl who wants to stop playing a video game. She wants to get up off the couch, and she can't. She's unable to move her eyes because the, our conscious will isn't that tightly connected to our motor behaviour, to the things that we do. There's all kinds of intervening, unconscious systems. And those are the systems that the social media companies have been hacking, taking over and reprogramming for their own ends.

MG: You say that before we look at the evidence around kids living in these kind of phone-based lives, we have to, to step back and kind of define what childhood is. Is there a sense that we don't know anymore what it means to be a child?

JONATHAN HAIDT: I think we've forgotten the active role that we all need to play in it. We think that our job is to just keep them safe. We want to protect them from threats. But that's actually kind of wrong because they need to take risks. And so, we're over-protecting them in the real world. We're not letting them have the experience that is what drives development. Experiences of going too fast on your bicycle and being scared, but then recovering or climbing a tree or getting into a fight with friends or an argument with friends. Kids need a lot of independent experience, and that's what makes up childhood. That's how they develop. But at least, especially in North America, we have this ridiculous idea that, no, our job is to be the chaperone, the helicopter, the snow plough, to solve problems for the kids. It's exactly the opposite. But then at the same time, we've abandoned our kids to grow up online, which is completely inappropriate for them. That kids are looking for influence, that's what human childhood is about, is you're developing skills in play, but you're also looking for role models. You're copying the kids who are a little older, you're copying the adults, some of the adults. And we've stopped being good role models for them. Instead, we say, "Okay, fine, you know, you're 10. You say all your friends have a phone and Instagram. Okay, go ahead." Before you know it, your kids are being raised and influenced by weirdos selected by an algorithm for their extremity. So, we've got to remember what childhood is, and what we need to do so that children grow and thrive.

MG: In the book, you talk about the spinner, which we used to call the Wheel of Death in the playground, the thing that kind of whips you around and the kids would get on it [JONATHAN HAIDT: Right, yup], they push it faster and faster, and some kids would fly off and some kids would hang [JONATHAN HAIDT: Yup] on for dear life. What? When you get rid of the spinner or the wheel of death? Sure. That there are, you know, orthopaedic surgeons who are cheering. But there might be others who say that we're losing something. What do we lose when, when that [JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah] thing disappears?

JONATHAN HAIDT: That's right. The key points here are, first, that, that humans are anti-fragile. We're not fragile. Children are anti-fragile like the immune system. [MG: What does that, what does that mean?] If you p--, so if you're fragile, then if something's fragile, it should be protected. But if it's anti-fragile, that means it needs challenges and shocks in order to grow. And so, our immune systems are anti-fragile. If you try to protect your kids from dirt and germs and bacteria, you're going to cripple the development of their immune system because evolution built it so that it has to be exposed to things in childhood. And then, it develops a biochemical response to those things. In the same way, children need to take risks and be afraid. Sometimes, they need to get into arguments. They need to be excluded and learn to deal with it. And if we protect kids from all those negative experiences and risks, it's as though we're crippling their immune system or crippling their social development. And that's why risk is actually essential. This was a really interesting part, that part of the book, I think that I learned by researching childhood play is that the feeling of fear, the feeling of risk of thrill is part of the active ingredient of play. And the fact that you called it when you were a kid, you guys called it the Wheel of Death. Now, obviously, you didn't believe that it would really kill you or you wouldn't play with it, but it made it more exciting to call it the Wheel of Death. And it is an exciting toy, an exciting playground structure. It was my favourite when I was a kid. I raised my own children in New York City and we have some good playgrounds here, but everything is so tame. It's plastic with rounded edges. It's almost impossible to get hurt. And that turns out to be bad because what you want is a playground where people, kids can take risks. They might get hurt, but not seriously hurt.

MG: You look in this book at one particular period, it's 2010 to 2015. When you say that everything changed in terms of, of the kind of play that kids would, would gravitate towards and the lives that they had. What happened in that in that five year period?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, so first, just before that period in America and Canada, we began cracking down on independent play because we are afraid our kids will be abducted. Well, we had a lot of crime here in the '70s and '80s. We began getting scared. But in the '90s, just as crime is plummeting, I don't know what your excuse was in Canada. I don't know why, you guys locked up your kids just as badly as we did. You know, we have all these horror stories of Canadian parents being taken in because their kids rode a bus. So, it happened throughout the English-speaking world, not just in the U.S., that we stopped letting our kids play outside independently. But at the time, you know, the Internet was coming in, computers were getting more interesting. And so we said, "Okay, it's too dangerous to go outside, but you can sit on a computer all day long and play." But even as late as 2010, kids are still meeting up a lot and doing things together. In 2010, very few have a smartphone. The iPhone comes out 2007, but in 2010, almost everyone has a flip phone, a basic phone, something that doesn't have the Internet. And in 20, also in 2010, the front-facing camera comes out for, the first phones have front-facing cameras. Instagram is launched, which is available only on smartphones, not on the Web. High-speed Internet connections are getting very common. So, I want listeners to compare a childhood and especially if you're a millennial, you probably remember this. In 2009, 2010, you had a flip phone, you texted your friends, you sometimes met up with your friends, but you couldn't spend eight, 10 hours a day on your flip phone. And that would just drive everyone crazy. By 2015, if you're Gen Z born after 1995, your child is very different from your older siblings who are millennials. Now all your friends have an iPhone, and you do, too. If you're a girl especially, everyone's on Instagram and you're communicating that way and you're posting and liking each other's posts and commenting. You have high speed, high speed Internet connection. You don't pay for texts anymore. So, by 2015, it's possible for the first time in human history for children to be online, not just 12 hours a day, a lot more than that. Half of American kids say that they are online almost constantly, almost constantly. And that wasn't possible before the smartphone. And that profoundly changes consciousness and human experience.

MG: You call this the great rewiring. I mean, when people think of rew--, they think of, you know, you're in your house and you're pulling these wires out and pulling new wires back in. What happens [JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, yeah] to kids' brains, do you believe, in that period? What is their great rewiring?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah. So, I meant the word rewiring in two ways. One is a kind of rewiring of childhood. If you think of childhood as having inputs and outputs. And then, we just radically changed all of that. And now, so much goes through the phone, not through people. Writing here as a social psychologist, there's a rewiring of the social order and sort of the currents of information that young people are immersed in. And those all get taken away from real world interactions and put into the digital space curated by 3 or 4 companies. I also believe that we're seeing a rewiring of brains. Now, this is harder to prove. You know, you kid, these things don't show up on a structural MRI. There are a few studies. They're finding some small things on functional MRI. But if you think about puberty, this is what really came to me when I was writing the book. Puberty is this very special, delicate rewiring process where the body and the brain convert over from the form that was adaptive for childhood to the form that's adaptive for adult sexual reproductive work life. And so, it happens over that just, you know, a few years is there early puberty especially is a few years from, let's say roughly 11 to 14 in that period. And in that period, the whole brain is actually sort of locking down into certain patterns. We lose the flexibility of a childhood brain. We have brain damage. As a, as a four year old, your brain will regrow, it'll recover. But in puberty, the neurones have developed. We kind of know what neurones need to be locked in. And then, you get this process of myelinisation, that is the neurones get coated with a fatty sheath. And now, the brain is much more effective. It's faster, it can do things, but it's now much less plastic, much less malleable. It's that rewiring process that really happens rapidly in puberty that we need to protect. And tragically, that is exactly when we give kids a smartphone and social media, it's around age 10 or 11 is now the norm in the U.S. and Canada and the U.K. Actually, the U.K., they get it even earlier. So, we've got to protect puberty. And that's why I say it's so important what Australia has done in raising the age to 16. We have to, we have to keep kids from just moving their lives onto these devices until they're most of the way done with puberty.

MG: This is when people's attention starts to get peeled away from the thing that ostensibly, they should be focusing on. There's a study that you cite that found that a typical adolescent gets 237 notifications in a day, 15 notifications every hour. [JONATHAN HAIDT: That's right, that's right.] What does that, what does that do to a childhood? I mean, you've called this attention fracking in some ways.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah. So, yeah: Fracking is where you drill down. You do things to break up the rock, and that allows you to suck out little bits of oil from every nook and cranny. And that's what the companies have done, especially TikTok and Meta. That's what the companies have done to, to human consciousness. Those two companies, plus Snapchat, they now largely own the attention and cognition and consciousness of young human children. These three companies in particular, we know from internal, from leaks, we know from recovered documents that there are all these lawsuits which we're getting out all these quotes from their own reports, their own memos. They set out to do this. They set out to grab as much attention as they can. They understand variable reinforcement ratio schedules from behaviourism, they time the notifications carefully to try to maximally get you back on their platform, not on someone else's. And what's the net result? I teach a course at NYU called Flourishing. It's 35 undergraduates, about mostly around 19 years old. What I find in our discussions, they're really haunting, is that their phones have filled up almost every available nook and cranny of consciousness. So, when they open their eyes in the morning, for the great majority, the very first thing they do is they reach for their phone and they check their notifications and messages. Before they get out of bed, before they go to the bathroom. So, that's the way the consciousness starts. Consciousness opens after you wake up, and it's on the phone. And what's the last thing they do before they go to bed? It's the same thing. The very last thing is to check their notifications, direct messages. And what do they do in between? It's largely that. If they're waiting for an elevator, the phone comes out. If they're sitting on the toilet, the phone comes out. If they're sitting at lunch with friends and there's a moment of quiet for lunch, the phone comes out. They see this happening, they lament it, but they feel powerless to stop because everyone else is doing the same thing. They don't want to be left out.

MG: You mentioned teachers quitting. We've talked a lot on this program about the impact in schools. What have you heard that does that, that fracking of attention in a classroom and you'd see this in, in your own classrooms as well?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Oh, sure. I mean, it's always been hard for teachers to get students' attention, but if they you know, if they're interesting, if they make it engaging, then they can. A good teacher is able to do that. Well, what good teachers have been discovering since the early 2010s is that nothing they do is as interesting as what's going on the phone. The phone is carefully designed with a customised feed just for you. Whereas the teacher has to teach us, you know, 20 or 30 students at a time. Once students have a phone, that's going to be more interesting than almost everything else going on in their world. And it's just complete madness that we've allowed children to take phone, their smartphones into school with them. When I was a kid in the '70s and '80s, you know, if they'd said, "You can bring in your television set, you can bring in your walkie talkies, harmonica, you know, whatever you want, bring it and use it during class." Or you might say, "Well, you can't technically you can't use it in class, but if you hide it under your desk, you can do whatever you want." That's what my kids tell me is the policy in New York City public schools. "Oh, you can't use a during class," but everyone does. It's just a complete tragedy for learning, for the teachers. They're demoralised. Their jobs are already so hard. One of the most revolutionary things that's happened this year, 2024, is schools around the world are going phone-free. I haven't heard anything about Canada, so you tell me. But across the U.S., a lot in the UK and Australia, schools are going phone-free. And that means not this stupid policy of, "You can't use it during class, you can only think about it and wait until class ends and then you can grab your phone and be on your phone in between class." And no, that's a terrible policy. It means you check your phone when you come in, you put it in a yonder pouch or a phone lock or just a simple envelope at the front of homeroom, and you get it back at the end of the day. That's the only policy that works, and it's miraculous. I can tell you I was just in Arkansas where hundreds and hundreds of schools are doing this and over and over, not just from the teachers, but from the kids. The kids themselves say they were a little afraid of it at first. But a week or two into it, they love it. Because they say it's just a lot more fun when you're actually talking to other kids.

MG: One of the reasons why, and Canada is trying to figure this out as well, and there are districts across the country that are trying to figure out how to how to balance that, or at the very least get the phones out of the hands of kids in class. One of the reasons why there's a real push around this is because of what those phones, and with the lack of attention and what the kids are seeing on the phone is doing to the kids themselves. And I mean, you mentioned the leaks from Instagram and other places. Meta, I mean, those documents came out showing the impact of social media, in particular on young girls. We talk a lot about that when it comes to body image and self-esteem. In the book, you write about boys as well. How has, how has that, how has social media affected boys differently than girls?

JONATHAN HAIDT: So, look at it this way. You want to trap girls? You want bait that will be appealing to girls. And that's social information. Girls are more interested in who is friends with who, who is fighting with who. They have a more evolved, elaborate social map. So, social media is a very effective trap for girls. Girls, once they take the bait, they can't get out because if you leave, you're alone. Everyone else is in there on these apps. For girls, the story focuses on social media, and what it has done to them. Endless social comparisons, the perfectionism, the sexual comments and sexual harassment. For boys, they use social media less. They're not quite as interested in, in the social network. Boys do get into a lot of trouble. They are easily sextorted by, by criminals around the world pretending to be sexy young girls. Once you're sextorted, you're going to think about suicide. And dozens or hundreds of boys have committed suicide after being sextorted. So, boys can be severely harmed by the bad things that happen on social media. Oh, fights break out, start there and then they become violent in the real world. But for boys, what we realised while I was writing the book with my research partner, Zach Roush, is that the boys' story is not focussed on social media. The boys' story is focussed on checking out of the real world into an exciting world online where you get to do the two things that are of greatest interest to teenage boys, which are war and sex. Boys are just much more interested in war, in group combat, whether it be sports or whether it be, you know, movies about war or whether it be video games where you get to play war. And then the other thing, of course, is sex, where you used to have to work for it or try to, try to get to know a girl if you're if you're straight or, you know, find some mild pornography and, you know, and your older brother's drawer or whatever you could find. But now, war and sex are effortless and they're amazing. I mean, the porn available to boys today is so powerful and so erotic compared to Playboy or whatever we had, you know, in the old days. And the war is so amazing and graphic and fun and exciting, but they're not actually developing any skills doing this. In fact, it renders them less able, I would say, to actually have a relationship with a girl. And maybe someday, you know, you can get married. It renders them less able to, to work with people, to manage their lives in the real world, to manage risk. So, boys are really checking out. They're not as likely now to go to college. They're not as likely to move out of their parents' home. We're just losing vast quantities of male talent, opportunity, and potential. It's really tragic. And I used to think that it was girls who were more affected by the whole thing because at the age of 14, it's clear the girls are doing worse. But Gen Z is now 28, the oldest are 28. And it's really the boys that are doing worse because so many of them have just failed to turn into men and they're just not going to be very effective or productive.

MG: I mean, as parents, we can feel that this is happening and we can have a sense that this is going on. But feelings, as you know, aren't facts. And the critics that have come after you have said that you're cherry picking evidence that you've missed, for example, the pandemic in terms of, of its influence on the mental health of young people. What do you, how do you respond to that, that people say [JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah] we don't actually know enough yet, that this sounds really compelling and we can feel that, but we actually don't have the evidence to show that this is, [JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, yeah] this is actually causing this?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, first. So, it's part of the, part of the dispute here is that when you're reviewing for a scientific journal, the standard is you have to be nearly certain. It's not just, "Hey, it looks like this experiment probably caused this." No, you know, we say "P less than 0.05." You have to be 95 per cent confident that this is what caused it. With a public health emergency, we don't do that. We don't say, "Well, we're not going to do anything until we're certain of what caused it." So, let's look at where we are. We have a public health emergency. It broke out in 2012 in multiple countries, many countries around the world. There is no other explanation. There's no other theory on the table.

[cross-talk]

MG: That's what you think this is? You think, you think this is a public health emergency?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Oh, yes. When you have the depression rate going up 50 to 100 per cent, you have the suicide rate is up 50 per cent in the U.S. at least, just the educational declines. Education has been declining in America since 2012, not since COVID. So, we have an enormous destruction of mental health, happiness, and education. This counts to me as one of the biggest public health emergencies we have ever had. So, there is no other explanation. No one's even proposed one for why this all happened in 2012. This did not, was not caused by COVID. It was all baked in by 2019. Secondly, there are many kinds of evidence. The people who know the most about what's happening are the companies themselves. They're the only ones who have the data, and we know from all the leaks and memos that have been obtained, they know what they're doing. They see the mental health problems they're causing. So, that's evidence the perpetrators actually admit to what they're doing. That's evidence. The people who know the next most about this are the kids, and the kids see what's happening. The kids are not in denial. Gen Z is not in denial. They know that this is messing them up. As one woman said in this beautiful poem, "We know it's poison, but we drink it anyway because we have to, because everyone else is drinking it." The people in the third most are the parents, and the parents all see it. See if you can find me parents who say, "Oh, my kid was shy and withdrawn. And then, we gave her a phone and Instagram and she really came out of her shell." I have not heard that story. You hear the reverse story over and over again. So, the parents, that's evidence, surveys of parents. It's their top worry. And now finally, we get to the scientific evidence, the evidence published in journals, which is largely based on a single item. How many hours a day do you spend on digital media, or on screens? Sometimes, it'll be focussed on social media. You get a number from 1 to 5, and then, you correlate that with mental health. And guess what? You do actually find a correlation. It's around 0.1, .15. That's not large in statistical terms, but when you have bad measurement on both ends, that's about the best you can do. It's around the same ballpark as the correlation of lead exposure and adult IQ. So, as far as I'm concerned, there are many forms of evidence. I'll grant that if you'd look only at the research published in journals about time spent on--, online, when you look at those experiments, it is ambiguous. There are good faith critics who think that, no, the correlations are too weak, they're not consistent. So, we're debating that. But let's not forget, there are a lot of kinds of evidence, and this is not like a previous moral panic spread by newspapers. This is everyone seeing it with their own eyes.

MG: So, we have to pause for the regional update. But we're going to continue right after the break. And I want to pick up on that idea of a moral panic. We're going to continue our conversation [Music: Theme fading in] with the social scientist Jonathan Haidt. He's the author of "The Anxious Generation." We're back in 90 seconds, and we'll talk more about this premise that phones and social media have rewired our kids' brains. And if that's the fact, what do we, how do we go about doing the rewiring of the rewiring, if I can put it that way, and figuring out how to get the phones out of the kids' hands, but also get them back out into the real world? More with Jonathan Haidt coming up in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current. Stick around.

[Music: Theme]

Jonathan Haidt on getting kids off phones – Part 2

Guest: Jonathan Haidt

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current. Before your regional update, I was speaking with the social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt. His latest book is called "The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness." This book has been on bestseller lists since it came out in March, and it's been fiercely debated for almost as long. We were talking about some of the people who have taken issue with, with your findings, some of the people who have accused you of creating a kind of moral panic around this issue of cell phone use. What do you make of that idea of a moral panic?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah, that's right. So, so, there is some, there is some accuracy to the claim in that this looks like previous moral panics. You do have stories in the newspaper. You do have, you know, parents blaming the technology that kids are using.

MG: In the past, it was, you know, satanic panic or are you going to listen to this record backwards and it's going to tell you...?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Exactly, [MG: Yeah] or comic books or, you know, novel? In the 18th century, it was novels which were going to excite the sexual passions of young women. So, they're right that this looks like a previous moral panic, but it's only a panic if it's unjustified. And the critics are saying, "There's nothing to see here. Nothing going on. There's not a mental health crisis," some of them say, although some agree there is. And even if there is a mental health crisis, it's not caused by the kids spending 12 hours a day on their phones. It's something else. So, that's plausible. But this is so different from the previous moral panics, because first of all, we have a mental health crisis that broke out at a very precise point, 2012, 2013. That didn't happen with comic books or any of the previous moral panics. We have a situation in which the parents are not freaking out because they read something in the newspaper. They're freaking out because they saw it in their nephews and nieces. They saw it in their friends' kids, and now they have a three or 4 or 5-year-old. And they discover, as I did, that the screen is the most magnetic thing for their attention and they will just sit there and not move. So, a previous moral panic was based on nothing but spread by media stories. This is not that. And then, a third difference is that in previous moral panics, the kids themselves said, "No, we like our comic books," but survey Gen Z about social media, and what you find, we did a survey with the Harris poll. We found 50 per cent, 48 per cent of Gen Z young adults said that they wished TikTok had never been invented. For Instagram, it was 35 per cent. Now, these are kids who are using TikTok and Instagram, but they use it because they're trapped. So, this is not like a previous moral panic.

MG: So, what do we do about it then? I mean, you mentioned Australia. Australia has banned social media for those under 16. There are questions as to whether this is actually going to work, whether you can properly age gate it. But is that, is that the kind of step that you want to see?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes. Oh, absolutely. Because the key to understanding how this got so far, so fast and the key to understanding why so many parents and teachers feel powerless is that if you try to solve the problem on your own, it's really, really hard. If you're the only teacher who doesn't, who really tries hard to be a phone policeman, then the students resent you for it. So, everyone gives up and we get the status quo. I wrote the book as a social psychologist looking not for law changes primarily, but for norm changes. We have to change the norms, and the norm. So, I lay out four norms, one of which we do need legal help on. The first norm is no smartphone before high school or age 14. Just you give your kid a flip phone if you want to text with them or a phone watch, but do not give them a supercomputer that allows the entire world to reach them until at least they're partway through early puberty. The second is no social media until 16. Social media is wildly inappropriate for minors. The sex, the violence, the sexual solicitation and harassment, the exposure to all kinds of influencers of ill repute. So, you know, we need a minimum age, as we have for so many things in the real world about sex, violence and addiction. So, just raise the age to 16. And Australia has taken the lead. They're doing a, the bold effort to just say we've had it. It's up to the companies to do this. Lots of industries age gate, lots of industries. If you want to sell alcohol or if you want online or if you want to do gambling, there are all kinds of industries that age gate, and there are lots of methods of demonstrating your age other than showing a government I.D. There are networks of validators, there are blockchain approaches. There's the company clear in airports. So, if Australia puts the onus on the companies, they'll figure it out really quick and they'll come up with multiple methods. The third norm is phone-free schools. And I urge you, Canadian listeners, if your kid is allowed to have her phone on her while she's in class or between classes, I guarantee you your child is not getting as good an education, and your child is not having as much fun or is not enjoying school as much. So, Canadian listeners, please. If your child can take a phone into school, get together, go to the school and say, "We got to change this, we've got to go phone-free. The way they're doing all over the USA, all over the UK, all over Australia. We've got to do this." The fourth norm is if we're, if we're getting the kids off of, off of the phones and the screens for a large part of the day, if we're rolling back the phone-based childhood, we have to restore the play-based childhood. We have to lighten up, ease up, understand that if an eight-year-old goes out with his friends and walks a quarter mile to a store with his friends and buys candy, that's good. That's not a death-defying feat. We all did it when we were that age. So, we've got to back off, give our kids the room to grow up, and I urge Canadian parents go to letgrow.org, which is an organisation I co-founded to encoura--, to give you all kinds of ways to do this, to back off together, give your kids the independence to grow.

MG: Let me just ask you just a couple more questions about accountability. One is you said that these big tech companies are in some ways in charge of our children now. Which is the company that you're most concerned about?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, you know, historically it's Meta in that it's been the biggest, the most important. And it's, it's one that has clearly done a lot to resist regulation and as it was promised to do better but hasn't. So, Meta is really the 800-pound gorilla here. But, pound for pound, the worst single project product out there is TikTok. I'm coming to see that TikTok has a devastating impact on, on people's ability to pay attention. It's the most addictive, it sucks up time, and it's horrible. It's so effective that Meta copied it, you know, with Instagram reels and YouTube copied it with YouTube shorts. So, the message for parents would be, I'd say the worst single thing for your kid is TikTok. I don't think anybody should be on TikTok, even adults. [MG: What account...?] And certainly not kids going through puberty.

MG: What accountability would you want from the people who lead those companies? You told Kara Swisher that the folks who are running these companies should be put on the same list as arms dealers?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, I think, she probably suggested that and asked me what I what I thought.

MG: Well, you agreed that they should be on that list.

JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, in that yes. I mean, I used to teach a course on business ethics here at NYU Stern. And there are certain industries, you know, alcohol and tobacco pre-eminently that are very, very profitable. But they make their living in ways that can end up really hurting people and posing a really severe cost. I'm not opposed to the armament industry. We need weapons. But if they're sold on the black market, then, you know, to people who will use them for, for terrorism, well, that's, that's really bad. But I don't want to go too deep into that comparison. What I want to focus on is the way that the United States government, the U.S. Congress, when we set up, we were so excited about the Internet and it was sort of our invention. And we had all the big com--, all the companies in it, and we wanted it to grow. So, we did a number of things. Congress said, "First, nobody can sue these companies for whatever they show," and that's Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. There was a reason for that. We don't want, we didn't want AOL to be responsible for every single thing that every person posted, but it ended up basically granting, a grant of immunity. We can't sue the companies for anything they do to our kids is basically the way it sent it up. And then, there's another law where we set the age of Internet adulthood to 13. We said, at what, at how old you have to be before a company can take your data without letting your parents know? And we said Congress, in its infinite wisdom, said 13. And Congress said there's no need to check as long as the child says she's 13. That's it, you're not responsible. So, the United States, we set up the Internet. We built in a complete absence of accountability. Almost no other industries have that where you can hurt as many people as you want and nobody can do anything about it. That's where we are. And so, I'm hopeful that other countries will not accept the terrible regime that we set up.

MG: The people who run these companies almost certainly have heard of your book. At the very least, I'm sure they've read it as well. Have you spoken with, for example, Mark Zuckerberg?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes, I spoken with him twice before, before COVID. Both times we had a similar conversation. He knows some of the psychological literature. We had a friendly debate about what it shows, and he said that, "Here's a study. The correlations are too low. It's, you know, there's no evidence of causation." I said, "No, but here are other studies in here." And I especially, I asked him about, you know, why is it so easy for children to open an account? You know, I said, I just made a fake account for my daughter. You're pretending to be her. She's not 13 yet. And it was, it was straightforward, very easy. And he said, well, he said, "Well, we're working on that." And that was 2019. And I don't think they've done anything since then.

MG: What would you say to, what would you, what would you say to him now?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, what I would say is look at the effect you're having on children. Your product creates a lot of value for adults. I've never disputed that adults get use out of these products. And, you know, we didn't know back in the early 2000s what effect this was having on kids. But it certainly seems from multiple sorts of evidence that kids who use your product are coming out worse off overall. And I would just urge him to, to become the hero in this story. Any company, I'm hopeful that I think Google is more likely to do this. Google, I think, has a better record of ethics. But any of these companies could be the hero and lead. You know, just as with automobiles, there were no safety features before the 1960s. There were no seatbelts. The glass would shatter and kill you. And someone predicted then, I can't remember who was this, they said some day, company car companies are going to compete on who has the safer car. And that happened. And so, I'm hopeful that someday, social media companies will compete on which one actually is better for kids.

MG: Just two final things. One is, is it possible I mean, is the horse not already long gone? The barn is way behind us and this technology is out and there's nothing we can do about it?

JONATHAN HAIDT: I hear that a lot. You know, the train has left the station. Okay. If the train's left the station, it's harder to call it back than if it's sitting there. That's true. But if there was a train leaving the station and it had all of our kids on it, and it was headed for a bridge over a, over a canyon that we knew the bridge was out, what are we going to do? Say, "Well, you know, the train's left the station. What are we going to do?" We would call ahead, we'd have somebody block the track. We try to get them out. I mean, you know, even if the train had left the station, we would call it back. I've been on aeroplane flights that were called back when they discovered a problem with, you know, you're out on the runway, you're about to take off. "Oh, we got to go back." So, the phone-based childhood is only 12 years old. It started right around 2012. It is not a permanent feature of society. We can choose, and that's what Australia has done. America has done nothing. We'll see. We have the Kids Online Safety Act is being considered. It's probably going to die. So, America's done nothing. We, we might never do anything. So, the rest of the world has to act because we created the monster and we can't tame it.

MG: What are you doing in your own house? We started with the story of your six-year-old. What happens in your own house with your kids?

JONATHAN HAIDT: So, I think I did a good job on keeping them off of social media, even though they wanted it in sixth grade when everybody else had it. And my daughter really wants Snapchat because she says she's the only one in her high school who doesn't have it.

MG: And you don't worry about that?

JONATHAN HAIDT: I would, I did worry that I was making the right decision, but I asked my college students here at NYU whether what they thought and they generally agreed, "Yeah, don't let her on Snapchat, either." It's not just texting. There's a lot of bad stuff that happens there. And she has actually, my daughter now actually agrees with me. She's 15. And even though it had meant some loss of social interaction, she sees the way it dominates kids' lives. She said to me in seventh grade, she said after a year of not having Instagram when all the other kids did, she said, "Daddy, Instagram makes the girls stupid." I mean, she could see it happening to her, to the other girls in her class. So, I did a good job on keeping them away from social media until 16. Where I've fallen down is I allowed screens in the bedroom. I really should have been much tougher on that. When I was a kid, there was a general rule: You don't have a tele--, no, no parent would let a kid have a TV in the bedroom. That's insane. But, you know, "Well, they need their laptop. They need to do homework." And before you know it, they've got the laptop and the phone and, you know, anything you do on a phone, you can do on a laptop. So, I didn't do a good enough job of controlling that. I would have had more, "You know, here's a computer out in the living room. You can use that when you're, you know, you're relatively little." In high school, "Okay. They're going to take a laptop into the bedroom." But I would have had much greater restrictions on it.

MG: It's hard.

JONATHAN HAIDT: It is hard. [MG: Yeah]. It is hard, but it's a lot easier if we act together, and that's the key thing. So, if you, if listeners will go to anxiousgeneration.com, we have all kinds of ideas, ways that you can coordinate with other parents, coordinate by school and, and push your legislators to do something to protect children from this because America is not going to do anything.

MG: Jonathan Haidt, I'm really glad to have the chance to talk to you. This is, it's an issue of our time and the book speaks to that. Thank you very much.

JONATHAN HAIDT: My pleasure, Matt. Thanks so much for the conversation.

MG: Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU's Stern School of Business. His latest book is called, "The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness." And you can see part of my interview with Jonathan Haidt tonight on the National, 9 p.m. on CBC News Network, and 10 p.m. on CBC Television.

[Upbeat piano music playing]

And Liberal MPs say Trudeau must resign

Guests: Chad Collins, Wayne Long

MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio. My name's Matt Galloway. As we were speaking about earlier in the program, it was a "tumultuous," is that a strong enough word, a tumultuous day in Ottawa? Yesterday, the finance minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, resigned with an open letter in which she made very clear her differences with the Prime Minister. Throughout the day, a growing chorus of Liberal MPs called for Justin Trudeau to resign. The Prime Minister hasn't said much in response. Wayne Long is Liberal MP for Saint John-Rothesay in New Brunswick, and Chad Collins is Liberal MP for Hamilton East-Stoney Creek, Ontario. Both have been calling for the Prime Minister to go and both join us now. Good morning.

WAYNE LONG: Good morning.

CHAD COLLINS: Good morning. Thanks, thanks for having us on, Matt.

MG: Chad Collins, Chrystia Freeland got a standing ovation yesterday in the caucus meeting. The Prime Minister [CHAD COLLINS: She did] was there as well. You were there in that meeting. What did you make of that?

CHAD COLLINS: I thought it was a very kind of sad and sombre event. And in terms of, you know, everyone recognised her contribution over the years in terms of the various portfolios that she's, she's had. And, and I think most people in the room kind of looked at her as a victim in terms of not just circumstance, but of the political machinations that are, that happen in the Prime Minister's Office, and happened quite regularly here in Ottawa.

MG: Do you see her as a victim?

CHAD COLLINS: I do. I absolutely do. I think most people in caucus know that she was dedicated to, you know, addressing some of the affordability issues that we have in the country. She was also dedicated to ensuring that we passed a fiscally responsible budget. And I think it's no secret that, you know, the Prime Minister is one who's open to spending, maybe more than we should. And I think those two visions and, and political positions collided last week. And I think the outcome was what we witnessed yesterday.

CHAD COLLINS: So just to be clear, I mean, in her resignation letter, she pointed out costly gimmicks. And people have assumed that was this idea of the $250 cheque that would go to working Canadians. It's not in the fiscal, the fall economic statement. There's also the GST holiday. Do you see those things as costly gimmicks?

CHAD COLLINS: I th--, I th--, the rebate for sure. You know, I was one of those people who openly criticised its release. It excluded seniors, and people with disabilities. I don't know how we try to address affordability issues for all Canadians and exclude those two very vulnerable groups. And, and it's not something I think we've been accustomed to doing in the past. And so, I, there were many people in caucus, without breaching confidentiality, who shared the same concern, who many talked about in making those investments in other areas like housing and in other portfolios. And so, it was a bit of a surprise when it was released. And I did, I do see it as a gimmick. And I really respect the fact that, you know, Ms. Freeland stood her ground and, and held the position, and took the position that she did. I, I, you know, I've heard from my constituents that they were very concerned about it. And, and again, I just think it speaks to two different visions for where we should go with the 2025 budget. And it seems as if, Ms. Freeland won that battle, it [MG: Just] wasn't as you just, you just mentioned, it wasn't in the fall economic statement.

MG: Just because you were in the room, let me just ask you one more thing. And I know there's confidence that you can't breach, but the Prime Minister did address members of caucus. Do you believe that the Prime Minister enjoys the confidence of caucus?

CHAD COLLINS: No, no, absolutely not. I think if there was a secret ballot that was held with caucus, I think it would be overwhelmingly, I don't think there's support there for the Prime Minister.

MG: So, there was this letter that was circulated earlier with names of MPs. You were on that letter, calling for him to resign. People have been saying over the course of yesterday that more names were added. How many people are on that letter?

CHAD COLLINS: That's, that'd be a guess for me. But I'd say that, you know, we're probably talking several dozen MPs who've now joined the list. And there were many, Matt, back in October who talked about, you know, I'm just not there yet. You know, give me a couple of weeks. Give me a couple of months, and let's see what happens through the Fall. Let's see what happens with the GST scenario in terms of whether it resonates with, with Canadians. It hasn't. And, and so, I think the, the actions that the Prime Minister took with Ms. Freeland, I think, convinced many that now's the time.

MG: Wayne Long, you were not at the caucus meeting yesterday, but you have obviously been watching this very closely. What do you make of the Prime Minister's response to yesterday's events?

WAYNE LONG: Well, I mean, a couple points. Thanks for having me on the show. The prime Minister's clearly lost the confidence of, you know, the party and the country. And, you know, I came out at the end of June and, you know, openly called for his resignation. Since then, you know, we've dropped more in the polls. We've had, you know, things like security clearance issues with Pierre Poilievre, foreign interference. We came out with the HST holiday. We continue to either drop in the polls, or stay the same in the polls. I mean, we are 20 to 22 points back. And let me summarise it this way. There's, I wasn't in the room last night. I had House Duty, and I wasn't allowed to go. But there is, there is no question that the Prime Minister feels, he knows what's best for the electorate and for the country better than the electorate and the country. There's no question about that. You can see it in his tone. You can see it in what he says. He feels he knows best, and he also feels that no matter what is happening come election time, it's going to be okay. You know, straight up...

MG: If he, but, if he's lost the confidence of caucus, if he's lost confidence of the party, why haven't more people put their names to that? Why aren't more people coming out? Why aren't cabinet ministers beyond Chrystia Freeland saying that they don't have confidence in him?

WAYNE LONG: You know, I mean, I've learned this before. I've come out against government in a few different situations over the past nine and a half years. And, you know, it's just human nature. A lot of people talk the talk. A lot of people are, you know, somewhat sincere in saying, you know, "I support you. I've got your back." But, you know, when push comes to shove, a lot of people still just take that pause. They don't want to take that extra step. And, you know, to me, the Prime Minister is clearly living in a delusional, false reality. He just, those around him are doing him a disservice. And, you know, I'm openly calling on Ministers, more Ministers. I mean, obviously, Chrystia Freeland, you know, with that letter, the bluntness and the directness of that letter, the timing of that letter, that was a direct vote of non-confidence in the Prime Minister. I mean, you can't be any more direct than that. [MG: What] So, my hope is that more Ministers will speak up. Like, look, Matt, in the lobby, if I don't get the "Wink, wink, nod, nod, attaboy, pat on the back," from my colleagues, including Ministers for the last four months, I get them every day. So, now is the time for Ministers who know what's right, who know what we need to do, that we are heading for destruction as a party if we continue with Justin Trudeau as our leader.

MG: Chad Collins, the Prime Minister made his pitch to caucus last night and again, not asking you to break any confidence, but, but is your sense that he is considering what you and Wayne Long are saying? Yesterday, I mean, some of your fellow MPs came out of that meeting saying, saying that "He's staying." Yasir Naqvi said that he believes the Prime Minister is staying on. So, is your sense that Justin Trudeau is listening to, to what you're saying, and what you've heard over the course of the day?

CHAD COLLINS: Well, it's anyone's guess, Matt, at this point. I mean, no one knows what's in the Prime Minister's head from one day to the next. And I was always one who would say to my colleagues that I think the Prime Minister will know when it's time to go. And, and I was wrong. I'm not certain, as Wayne just alluded to, I'm not certain that the Prime Minister does know when it's time to leave. And one thing I'm aware of being in politics as long as I have been, and you and I are relatively the same age, you know, through my life, I look at all of the Prime Ministers who've served Canada and, you know, that there's an average length of time in office that Canadians have given them. In terms of, his Dad was in for 11 years. Mr. Mulroney when he was in for nine, Mr. Chrétien was in for 10, Harper was in for nine, right? There's, there's some very common numbers there in terms of nine and 10 years. And I think history tells us that organically, Canadians desire change after that 9 or 10-year mark. And we're at that point. And, you know, he and, I think he certainly knows history. And no one's won for four mandates in a row since Laurier. I mean, that's 100 years ago, over 100 years ago. And so I, I just, I don't know what's going through his head. And I think, you know, we have a, a chorus of calls from across Canada, not just from our constituents, but from our colleagues asking him to leave. And I think we're well past that point now. And, and the more time that, you know, that we lose going into the new year, the less time we have to properly prepare for his successor and for someone to come forward, not just to the party, but to Canadians with a new vision in terms of, you know, what does the 2025 mandate look like for us? And I think, you know, what we fear is a Poilievre government, and he was in my municipality recently with, as part of his Make Canada Great Again tour. And, you know, he talks about fixing the budget, and we all know what fixing the budget means. It means cuts to social programs. It means, you know, defund the CBC. It means all kinds of things, right? And so that, I think, is what's motivating a lot of members. [MG: Right.] This isn't self-preservation. This is about what's possibly coming in 2025. And I think it's incumbent upon us, as Wayne has alluded to, to do everything within our power to ensure that we put our best foot forward.

MG: Wayne, we're just about out of time. There may be a little bit of self-preservation in what some people are saying, because the polling would suggest that many Liberal MPs will lose their seats. But you suggested that this is also about the party. What sort of damage did yesterday, the events of yesterday from the letter by Chrystia Freeland, but also what unfolded after that letter came out, what sort of damage did that do to your party, do you think? Just briefly.

WAYNE LONG: I think, I think the Liberal Party's an institution in the country and we can recover very quickly, but we need a viable alternative to Pierre Poilievre. Like, he's absolutely beatable, but he is not beatable with Justin Trudeau, like I have not seen visceral dislike for a Prime Minister like this really since probably Brian Mulroney, when the Conservatives were reduced to two seats. That's where we're headed...

MG: And you, you believe your party could recover from that. If Justin Trudeau were to take a walk in the sand or on the snow or whatever, wherever he goes for his holiday, that that would be something that could give life back to your party?

WAYNE LONG: There's, there's no question. There's no question that we can, you know, mount a viable alternative and win the next election. Like, to me, it's so frustrating when I talk to Ministers in our government and say, "Look, if we continue on this path, Pierre Poilievre is going to reverse everything we've done. So, why not make a change now? Why not have some more policies that move us a little more to the centre where we should be anyway? And let's find a place where we're appealing to Canadians." And right now, you know, like I said yesterday, like, we're not a ship that's taking on water. We're the Titanic right now, and we need to really change direction.

MG: We will be watching. It was quite a day yesterday. I appreciate you both being here this morning to talk about what happened, and where you may go from here. Thank you very much.

MG: A pleasure.

CHAD COLLINS & WAYNE LONG: Thanks, Matt.

MG: Wayne Long is the Liberal MP for Saint John-Rothesay in New Brunswick. Chad Collins is the member for Hamilton East-Stoney Creek in Ontario. There will be more coverage of this story as the story unfolds. [Music: Theme fading in] Of course, you can find that on the CBC News app, right here on your CBC Radio, cbc.ca, and beyond. That is The Current for this Tuesday, the 17th of December. Q's up next on CBC Radio One. Tom Power's speaking to Cher. That will be worth sticking around for. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

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Tuesday, December 17, 2024 Full Transcript

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